Add Expenses + Another Category to the Same Transaction

[nagra]

Hey guys,

• I love the category feature, especially considering it does it automatically
• I’m not too bothered about having the ability to create custom categories, but I would love the ability to assign multiple categories to a single transaction.
• The prime argument for this feature is so I can mark transactions as expenses (reimbursed by my company), without losing my beautiful monthly spending breakdown

Thanks

P.S. Keep up the great work

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Hey nagra,

Thank you for not making this another post about custom categories!

One of the ideas that have been suggested when looking for a solution to the custom categories problem, is creating sub-categories for transactions. However, I expect these would be more granular categories, while the main (parent) categories remain the same (& only one could be applied to each transaction, here’s Hugo’s explanation for why multiple categories can’t be applied to a single transaction ).

@hugo

1. If you use more than 1 tag per transaction (for example, a meal could be #lunch and #food) then we couldn’t give you easy comparison tools because the totals per tag wouldn’t add up. For some people that’s not a problem (they understand exactly how the calculations are made) but for others it will be confusing “How’s that possible that this week I’ve spent £50 on #food and £30 #lunch but I’ve only spent £50 in total?”.

There are ways to solve that but it’s one of those cases where (I think) reducing the complexity in the first place is the only acceptable solution. Yes, it’s a bit less powerful, but it’s way easier to understand and use for the average user.

I think the reason why there’s a dedicated Expenses category, is that you wouldn’t want spending on Eating Out, that will be reimbursed by your employer, to count against your Target for that category. Could you talk us through how this would be beneficial for you?

If you’re looking for a breakdown of your monthly spending on Expenses, I guess this would need a dedicated view & set of categories (so that it doesn’t impact your Targets or Monzo’s aggregation - see the post I quoted for more details) but that would potentially confuse some users…

[nagra]

Hey @alexs,

TLDR: I retract my original feature suggestion and understand why it would be difficult and confusing to implement

After reading Hugo’s explanation, it does make a lot of sense why it would be confusing, and I agree the product should be kept simple and clean to use.

The use for this is probably more of an edge case, for example for someone whom is self-employed. Their daily transactions and expenses could technically be coming out of the same account. However, if they marked all transactions as expenses, they would lose the ability to accurately see their spending breakdown i.e. what the expenses were spent on.

Ultimately, this feature would be redundant if or when Monzo launch “Monzo for Business”. That way all transactions being under a business account would inherently be expenses, without needing to mark them explicitly. This would then allow us to add one of the other default categories to get the monthly breakdown.

Thanks
Kam

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

What you’re suggesting there sounds good but I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you…

Personal vs. Business bank accounts

We don’t plan to offer full business accounts because the requirements are so dramatically different. Multi-user access controls, card acquiring, accounting, invoicing, etc, etc Sole-traders and freelancers are probably close enough to a personal current account that Mondo would work for those cases.

Tom recommends using Tide instead (who are backed by Monzo’s investor’s Passion Capital).